Error cards have been around since the beginning of card collecting. Errors in terms of modern cards are often thought of as the types that contain wrong information. However, collectors of early cards know that other kinds of error cards can be quite desirable.
Print standards have come a long way. Today, cards with print flaws will often be destroyed or not considered for insertion into packs. That has increased, too, as today’s collectors have demanded mint or gem mint cards in packs for grading purposes. But standards were much lower in early cards.
While cards with major flaws may not be terribly common, there are a fair number out there for collectors willing to dig. And unlike many cards with print errors from later years, there is often a premium associated with such cards in pre-war collecting.
Here are a few common types of early printing and production errors.
Registration Errors
My favorite type of print errors are probably those with registration errors. These are errors that cause a picture to be out of focus.
You can find registration errors in post-war vintage cards. But in those instances, they often aren’t too dramatic. However, in earlier cards, these types of wild printing mistakes are more common.
Strip cards usually offer the most extreme examples. These cards that were printed and hand cut (or even torn) directly from uncut sheets or strips were not exactly strict in quality control. The W516 set of baseball cards, for example, is one where these types of errors are common. Here is a Walter Johnson, which is probably my favorite print error card.
You can see the wild shift that occurs by the red ink being printed too far to the right (or the rest of the card being printed too far left).
A similar type of mistake is seen in this 1935 Goudey card featuring Boston Red Sox players, too. Those were full-color cards and you can see the result if even the printing for one color is misaligned with the others.
Major print registrations such as this one are far less common in gum era cards than they are in the strip issues.
Major Centering Issues
Cards that are printed and subsequently cut off center are not uncommon in any era. Few cards in early sets by comparison, after all, do not have 50/50 centering all the way around.
But while there isn’t a premium for cards that are cut slightly off center, there certainly is one for very drastic examples of miscuts.
Here’s an example of a T201 Mecca Double Folders baseball card that I recently acquired. The card features both Ira Thomas and John Coombs from the Philadelphia Athletics.
Double Folders have a horizontal crease to fold down and reveal the top half of another player (which aligns with the bottom half/legs portion of the card. Coombs is not visible from this angle but is if the card is folded down.
While you can’t really see the horizontal factory fold in the image here, what you do see is a vertical line. That, of course, is where the card should have been cut. Instead, it was cut poorly, resulting in what looks like two separate cards.
While drastic miscuts like this are rare in the T201 set, they are not impossible finds, as demonstrated here. I’ve seen quite a few miscuts from this release that are similar, even if they are a small percentage of the overall population.
Missing Color
Another common type of print error in pre-war cards is the famous missing color mistake.
I recently purchased these three cards from the 1930s gum set, Schutter-Johnson’s “I’m Going to Be,” which focused on different occupations for children. These cards are supposed to be printed in full-color. However, the only colors that made the printing in this trio appear to be the primary colors red and yellow.
Ironically, red is often a color that was missing from print error cards in several sets, including T206. Often, the players depicted on those cards will be showed with pale skin or, more blatantly, with red lettering missing or not colored properly.
As you might expect, missing colors are quite common in strip cards, too.
Here’s an example of a misprinted card representing the baseball pitcher from the multi-sport W542 strip card series. W542 is a 10-card set where print quality control was not terribly strict.
In this card, the color of missing ink is easy to spot.
You can see it quite clearly in two places. First, the pitcher’s uniform pants where the ‘correct’ card (on the right) displays them as yellow. Second, in that card, the grass is green. Yellow is obviously the color missing in the first card. Not only would the pitcher’s pants be colored in, but the blue playing field shown here would be green.
Interest in cards missing color varies greatly. And in the cases of cards with only lessened ink color, a premium is not often realized. But in general, the more colors missing and the crazier the card looks, the more desirable it becomes.
Hand Cuts
Strip cards are known for being cut by hand, sure. But occasionally, you will find hand cut cards in tobacco and candy cards, too. In those instances, often they are considered ‘scraps’ if the hand cuts are drastic enough. Cards exhibiting that feature, too, will sometimes feature some other defect, such as missing color or registration issues. It is expected that some of these never even made it into the intended product and may have been rescued and kept by a printer.
Two things here. First, slight trim jobs don’t qualify as the type of hand cuts I’m talking about here. Second, what is left of the card after it is hand cut is a key factor in determining if a card was roughly hand cut at the factory shortly after printing or if it was performed by a collector in recent years.
For example, a collector could trim a card on all four sides today and declare that it was a desirable ‘factory’ hand cut scrap card. But if a normal-sized card was cut down on all four sides, it would simply be undersized.
Cards that are still larger than standard cards, even after the cutting, are the ones that are more likely to be identified as a true hand cut/potential scrap that went unissued. Here’s an example of that with E91 American Caramel cards picturing Washington Senators infielder Jim Delehanty.
The card on the left is a normal-sized card with regular borders. The card on the right is hand cut on all four sides. You can see that, despite those hand cuts, the card is still taller and wider than the regular-sized card and more likely to be a true hand cut that left the factory in that manner.
Blank or Wrong Backs
Yet another type of print and production error of note is one for cards with blank or wrong backs.
Blank-backed cards need little introduction. While some cards were intended to have blank backs (often in strip issues), there are blank back errors for cards that were not meant to be that way. Those are found in many sets and are almost always desirable to collectors.
It should be noted that blank-backed cards can sometimes be misidentified. For instance, a card that was glued into a scrapbook and subsequently removed could be left with the back not intact. Similarly, collectors have intentionally skinned the backs of some cards, removing the layer that was there and leaving a damaged blank back. Neither of those, of course, is the same thing as a factory-issued blank-backed card that mistakenly did not have text on the back printed.
A more intriguing mistake is cards that had incorrect backs printed on them.
Incorrect backs can mean a variety of things. Some backs can be printed drastically off center, even with a centered front. Others can be printed with a different/incorrect back. Here’s one in my collection from the C60 Imperial Lacrosse set. The player pictured is Eugene Gauthier.
However, the back is that of another player (Pringle) and was printed upside down to boot. Cards with these types of print errors are not common.
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